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Investors started the year excited, then disappointed, about the potential of a Facebook IPO and a $50B valuation. But fortunately, the upcoming LinkedIn IPO and its $2B valuation gives them an opportunity to get in the game and cash in on the much talked-about “social network” trend.

The LinkedIn IPO is indeed exciting, but if you are an executive, you should spend more than just your money on LinkedIn – you should spend time understanding how the social network works, and how its model can help you build better applications for your organization.

LinkedIn offers many practices that organizations should follow when building internal applications. In this post, I’ll focus on two: how LinkedIn thinks about productivity, and its approach to data.

“Time In App”

Most productivity applications measure success by the number of hours its users spend in it. For example, we know that Facebook represents about 12% of your internet time. According to Nielsen Research, internet users spend close to 5X more time on Facebook than YouTube. So Facebook wins, right? Wrong! While “time in app” might appear to be a great gauge for stickiness, LinkedIn’s CEO argues that it might not be the right measurement (see Jeff Wiener’s explanation at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference here).

While Facebook’s drive towards advertising dollars might justify the importance of the ‘time in app’ metric (you might have noticed Facebook’s recent advertising addition to your photos?) – LinkedIn focuses on productivity for its members (LinkedIn makes money via ads, but member services and enterprise hiring services are also part of its business model).